


Starting Over (Have to See It to Believe It)

by RainofLittleFishes



Category: Homestuck
Genre: After, Blind Sollux POV, Karkat manhandles Sollux and Sollux is very okay with that, M/M, Porny Fluff and Angsty Feels, dea ex machina won’t solve depression but isolation probably won’t help it either, things would be looking up but really it's more appropriate to say they're feeling up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-08
Updated: 2016-07-08
Packaged: 2018-07-22 11:27:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,788
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7435807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RainofLittleFishes/pseuds/RainofLittleFishes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everything, everyone, started over... unless you count the blind bee nerd nightly retracing new physical territories as if Karkat's room is a dreambubble he doesn't dare leave. Or does he?</p><p>For SybLaTortue, based on one particular SolKat picture of hers: </p><p>  <a href="http://syblatortue.tumblr.com/post/119832586656/saw-someone-reblogged-these-old-doodles-of-mine">Karkat groping blind!Sollux</a></p>
            </blockquote>





	Starting Over (Have to See It to Believe It)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SybLaTortue](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SybLaTortue/gifts).



> For SybLaTortue~ (Happy Belated Birthday!!)  
> Much appreciation for all your art, worldbuilding, and general musings!  
> This is based on one particular SolKat picture of yours, and I was all about the woo hawt but it was Sollux so instead of flat out porn all the muse would crank out was tender touching, implied sex, and sad bee-nerd. (I console myself with the thought that Karkat's post-molt exercise routines don't need weights, he just shoulder presses Sollux.)

*

You really, really like it when Karkat puts you where he wants you, establishes, over and over, that you are whole as you are, wanted, that there is a physical space to hold your physical being, a match to the space where you are welcome to exist, as you are, and without explanation. You have a right to live. You have a right to breathe, and eat, to fear and be reassured. You have a right to exist, and a right to do so without apology or fighting.

It’s not that you wouldn’t fight, if you had to, but it’s nice to not be alone. You haven’t left the island. There’s really no one here to fight.

You like it when Karkat turns face-to-face time into scoop-Sollux-up-into-KK’s-super-buff-arms time. You like it when he holds your wrists in place and takes you apart one slow track of mouthing, kisses, and bites at a time, across your neck, your shoulders, your back or chest. Karkat’s default is slow and methodical, and you still don’t know if it’s because that’s his favorite, or because he likes to watch you go to pieces first.

Where is the shouting flailing feely beast of your shared wigglerhoods? When did he grow into the steady troll that can engulf your wrists in one paw, the deep voiced adult that can take you from fond to inflamed in two seconds of suggestive rumbling? While you were gone. Dead, or something like it.

It makes you ache, because you’ve barely spoken of it, and he won’t make you listen, it’s not the place of a matesprit. But you were dead, and now you’re not, and while you were gone, he lived, and grew, and mourned you. You think maybe you’re almost ready to ask. You’re almost ready to ask if he wants to talk about it. Fuck quad limits. Aradia was right. People don’t need boxes to live in, they need boxes to grow out of. The meteor is your incubator and you need to grow out of it. Someday. Not tonight. Maybe tomorrow.

You’ve told yourself _maybe tomorrow_ for so long you don’t remember how many times over you’ve lied.

He lifts you slowly enough that you might be a weight in the gym and not a lover, hands at your hips, the meat of his palms over the front of the bones, the length of his fingers wrapping. He lifts you up, further than you anticipated, past the point where he usually stops, arm or arms under your ass, or the point where a handy table or wall would meet your butt or back.

He lifts you over his head, and you know that he’s tilted his own head to watch you because your hands are now on his shoulders and the elevation has made your psionics light, the room snapping into clearer focus. He hefts you, once, twice, and you tighten your grip on his shoulders. “I’m not going to drop you. Promise.” And your hands clench again, not because you’re afraid, or surprised, or expected any differently, but because the last word drops so low you hear it more in your horns and chitinous grubscars than your ears. You run one hand up his neck, the side of his face, into his hair, and you kiss his closer horn because it’s all you can reach.

He lowers you over his shoulder, near arm wrapped over your legs and under your butt. You lick the back of his neck, tasting him, enjoying the little squinch motion he makes and you wonder if you shuffled over a bit if he could wear you over his shoulders like a scarf. You wiggle, experimentally, and he bumps you up with a quick flex of his knees and shoulders, further than you meant, you think, and you find yourself dangling above his butt, the flex and contraction of his back odd under your hands with the inverted orientation. He walks to the reclining plane as you poke the flexings of his back muscles and give his near grubscar a good twist. He pats your butt, softly, and you manage a lurch far enough to pat his butt back, a lurch that doesn’t end with you impacting the floor headfirst mostly because he manages to grab your knees in the bend of his elbow as you hurtle toward consequences. Eh. You probably would have caught yourself psionically before you really hit.

He leans over the bed and your hands are on the blankets before his far arm manages to get under your back as he contorts and swings you a bit. He scoops you up into the more familiar frontal carry that the humans call bridle, an odd bit of linguistics involving the servitude of contractual mating and childcare alliances, and lays you out on the very soft bed. You still don’t like to sleep on it, at least by yourself, too soft, but it’s nice for this. You pull him down by his shoulders and he blankets you, straddles you so that his front meets yours but his legs are tucked up to take his weight. You can take his weight, have, you enjoy it highly, but it takes a toll after a while, as heavy as he is in comparison to you. This is a nice compromise, at least for short periods of time, you can reacquaint yourself with each other, warm and secure, and still able to breathe freely. In a few minutes he’ll flip over and you’ll clamber on top. That’s nice too.

*

It was hard to understand for some, that when the world ended and began again and everything was fresh over… you decided to remain blind.

What might've made it easier for them to understand is if they had had the Voices and then the silence and understood that so long as you cannot see, you only hear what is really there.

You don’t bother to explain. Either they get it or they don’t and it’s not your place to help other people understand you. You’re only just beginning to understand yourself. It’s confusing but you finally feel like your skin almost fits.

It was a bargain of sorts, to forgo sight and Visions, the both or neither. There are things you miss and there are numerous frustrations, of course there are, but you feel like it was an equal exchange. You can navigate, you still have your horns and psionics. Text is a bitch, especially printed, but you can type just fine and there are reading programs. More now, since you started tweaking them and building your own.

You haven’t had a headache since you died and that is the most amazing thing. The. Most. Amazing. You still surprise the people who knew Before and After. You’re a snarky ass, but much more laidback now, and not just because you’re getting laid on a regular basis. From chronic pain to just the occasional strain, bruise, or twinge... It. Is. Amazing. You are clearheaded and well rested for the first time in… as long as you can remember.

You used to wonder, when your migraines were really bad, which one would be the aneurysm that took you out. Darkness for a lack of pain? It’s an even bargain, you probably even got the better end of it.

You tell yourself you don’t even mind the dark.

Most of the time, it’s true.

That's not to say that no one understands you. Terezi understands well enough, and Karkat understands you more than is _fair_ , (all those romances are in no way a proper guide to trolls, when did KK grow up?!), and there are others as well.

Aradia understands and no longer pities you, and it feels less like pain at the loss of your long ago maybe matespritship, and more like having molted to a higher evolution. She doesn’t pity you because you’re less pitiable. You’re _glad_ to be less pitiable, it _sucked_.

There are people that don’t understand and that’s okay, because if they don’t understand, or try to, you’re not obligated to make it make sense for them. Tavros can walk now, unaided, and you’re not bitter that the reset was kinder to him. He’s never tried to make you admit some personal failing as the root of your change. Vriska, well, Vriska’s never been anything other than a bitch so you’re not surprised. Feferi wasn’t really a surprise even if the thought of her unintentional condescension leaves a dry taste in your mouth. Kanaya and Rose seem content to let you be as you are, which is nice. Peaceful, because they can both be cutting and they aren’t, not to you.

You’ve never been very close to Nepeta, but she’s… unthreatening. She sends you short inquiries without her quirk so that your first text-to-speech programs never stumble and she draws you out into short roleplays that don’t demand anything. Karkat seems pleased when you talk to people, or eat, which you mostly only do when they start it, or he brings you something, so you try to be patient.

You try not to yell when you trip over moving boxes, or when your text-to-speech programs flub because you haven’t finished programming in the quirks correctly. You threw something at Eridan when he surprised you, but he ducked in time, so you haven’t actually killed anyone after the reset. Someone shouldn’t have left a drawer’s worth of knives on the counter. You were surprised, and the weight was wrong, but your psionics recognized something to be drawn in your defense, so you’re not entirely loathsome. You didn’t mean to, but no one was hurt, which is more than Eridan can say about the majority of his life.

It’s not your responsibility to make your existence make sense to other people. You have enough trouble making sense of yourself for yourself, and it probably doesn’t help that you had learned to speak in circles or change the subject to avoid certain headaches, real and metaphorical. You learned long ago that insulting people derailed nosy inquisitions, which is just as well as nobody expects otherwise from you, though less amusing when you find yourself doing it to yourself.

Terezi might say, _well, I wouldn't want to disappoint Mom_ , and she might've gotten back her sight but that's not to say she doesn’t lick things for the heck of it.

Karkat lasted through to the very end, and didn’t get re-hatched so much as upgraded. He molted soon after the restart and came out built like an immature drone. Funny, because there aren’t any drones in the new world and so the only group that understands the reference can argue all they want but it’s an inside joke now.

You are no longer contemporaneous. You died earlier and came back older, at least according to your Game-provided identification card, but not by as much as the others, just old enough for Ascension, barely. If you rounded up. Rose says that on earth, under the government to which all four of them but Jade were born, at 19 earth human years you would have been old enough to die for their distant government, but not old enough to buy sopor concentrate equivalent.

Humans are strange. Were strange. Who knows what the new ones are like, you haven’t left the once-meteor-now-island. One step at a time, maybe two. Hopefully not straight into whatever packing boxes someone left out. Again. You figure not being dead is a good excuse to take your time, and you would have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for Karkat.

Present Karkat is the kind of person to cut straight through your roundabouting and take down the problem head on, a reaper in the middle of a crop circle. And he does, and you enjoy it, even initiate it, in your own way, with a certain stance or an unnecessary bend and waggle. When you don’t want to think, can’t think without circling, Karkat provides a much better alternative.

Why do the humans call it a bee line? Haven’t they observed bees? Bees don’t fly in straight lines. They launch and buzz and have to gain altitude and deal with wind and make multiple stops. When they return to the hive they don’t just dump their payloads and buzz off. They communicate, and communication is a dance.

So if you seldom say, “ _KK, put your mouth to better use_ ”, or, “ _I need you to put those overgrown grasping appendages down my pants and over my throat_ ”, well, it’s been said often enough that precedent was set and now you only need a certain sideways slide or waggle. You have your own language, and always have, even when the central tenet was _yes, we’re still friends_.

*

The computers in Karkat’s block, his and yours, are in fine working order. That doesn’t prevent you from giving them weekly upgrades. Almost nightly, you can be found tracing out their functions and augmenting or correcting them… or just rearranging his cords and thinking. Nightly, you invite his gaze, his hands, his heart, and he always answers.

You bend over his desk, barefoot, fiddle with the nest of wires from your last session, let the puzzle draw you in with a hum under your breath, the quiet is nice but so are other noises now. You are drawn in so far that even you are surprised when he speaks your name from the doorway, crosses the room in slow audible steps, sets something on your desk and covers your vulnerable back with his mass.

He slides a hand up your shirt from the front and holds you like that. You are safe between his open palm and his heart. He tucks his head into your neck and inhales, scenting you, exhales, inhales again, sets his teeth into last night’s bruise with a pinch and then mouths it. His breath is cool when it skates over wet skin and makes you shiver.

You like wearing his marks. You can’t see them, but you can feel them. They prove, when you wake up in the day, alone, that this is not a dream. You don’t often wake up alone, but even when you do, this way he’s still there. The recuperacoons are gone, just like sopor. Waking to an empty bed feels a bit like waking alone in a too-soft pile with edges too soft for you to ascertain, as if your dreambubble trembles at the top of cliff, ready to drop you into the unforgiving below. So long as Karkat marks you, you don’t have to pinch yourself. You don’t have to scratch lines into your skin, or bite your lip until you taste salt.

Karkat’s teeth are dull for trolls, but that’s what makes it perfect because he can set the entire circle of them at the join of neck and shoulder and bite into a perfect impression of his claim. He doesn’t break the skin, but sets his mark and then grips, imprinting a circlet like a crown into your shoulder. When he grips you there, really grips, and not just a quick clench, you can trace the resulting circle and feel each tooth crest. The intimacy of it makes you relax, into the grip of his teeth, his hands, the cradle he makes of his body to receive your own. He can run a claw tip over the fresh impressions, and the ticking over of each, rim to trough, sets little pings through your whole body.

Last night you knelt under his desk wiggling a come-hither that was less about desperation then distraction. He had asked if you would visit Jade with him, off the island, but still isolated from crowds. _Are you up to it? Would you consider it?_

He usually just asks you if you’re up to going Outside tonight, and you compromise and join whatever chatlog furor is ascending, descending, or in various stages of exploding. Vriska’s still a bitch, Eridan’s still an entitled brat, Feferi wants everyone to get along, John pranked someone, Dave is tangenting into wild human metaphors, Jade’s experimenting on something, Aradia and Terezi are adventuring headfirst into your new shared world, stopping in only to make observations on all the methods by which they will likely be detained by the local authorities, Equius is ashamed of all of you, Gamzee joined a human circus, Nepeta and Tavros are attaining additional schooling, Kanaya has provided life advice that will be ignored until she can rightly say _I Told You So_ , Rose is smug. Not much has changed.

Except everything has. Everyone’s grown. Everyone’s moving on. Everyone but you.

The meteor is huge but familiar now. You can navigate by psionics and scent and echoes, and it’s quiet now, like almost everyone’s left. The world outside is very big. Unknown. Dangerous. And you have given up your warnings against it, vision and Voices both. You have deliberately limited yourself and you are fine with your new horizons. Really.

 _Don’t make me. Don’t let go. Don’t leave._ It’s weak and you’re ashamed but he doesn’t even laugh at you, not anymore, not since you came back.

_I won’t._

He knelt behind you and you had padded the desk edge with your arm, braced yourself. He was warm behind you and around you, one leg over yours, his hands up your shirt, down your pants. You locked your other hand into his jeans and pressed back into him. He was slow and steady and when you rocked back into him you could feel the perfect tension of him, jeans still zipped, butt parked on your calves but most of his weight still on his feet. He grinned into his mark on your shoulder and held you, held your own tension, greeted each of your embarrassing noises with appreciation.

When it was over, he rose without taking his hands off of you, drew you up with him. Along your back, along your mostly quiescent psionics, you could feel a fine trembling due to the duration of his awkward squat, in no small part also a flattering response to watching you. It fills something in you to know that he enjoys this, enjoys playing your body and mind, gently and thoroughly, enjoys pushing himself to enjoy without falling over that precipice. You used to tease Karkat over his masochistic tendencies, how he was determined to throw himself at impossible projects to inevitable results, but you always admired his determination, no matter how futile you thought it. How odd, how appropriate, how enjoyable, that that thread of determination should manifest now, like this.

He likes to watch you come, likes to watch you drink after, likes to watch you eat, likes to wash your back, your hair, your face, your front. All the innumerable weird indignities of living, and he wants to watch you do them all. He missed you. You’re sorry you left, though you still can’t think of anything else you could have done. You’re always just a little bit too slow. Games always have workarounds, and you should have been able to stop all of this earlier. You still can’t think how. You run yourself in circles and still come up empty-handed, empty-headed. You are a hole and everything has drained out. There is nothing left of you but what KK can salvage. You turn toward him as if, despite his warmth at your back, you need to be able to reach forward, hold on to him, or he might vanish into the dark, like everything else. He reaches back and his arms are around your waist, lightly, comfort without constraint.

Karkat asks you if it would be alright for Jade to visit. Okay. Yeah. You haven’t ~~seen~~ you haven’t heard her directly for a while. How long? You’re not quite sure. It’s been… a while. When did everyone else leave the meteor? You haven’t tripped on moving boxes for nights. Weeks? You haven’t heard any voices but Karkat’s, and less often, your own. KK helped you build a swarm server for the survivors of your hive and you can’t remember the last time…

_KK, the bees, are the bees okay?_

_Yeah, I’ve been taking care of them._

_You?_ You’re grateful but you can’t help the reflexive surprise. It comes out meaner than you meant.

 _Me. I haven’t even blown anything up. It’s not that hard when I’m not trying to get them to do anything. I just make sure they have access to water and the outside._ He’s not offended, not now, not knowing you as well as he does. He sounds amused. You run your hand up his thorax to find his mouth without whacking him in the face, and when you find his lips, you can feel his smile. You can’t help the reflexive smile in response, though a moment later you drop hand and smile both. 

 _Oh._ You hadn’t really thought about that. The meteor is an island now. There’s an outside. You know that, but it always surprises you, like stepping forward and falling over an unseen edge.

You wonder how much of what you’re thinking is visible on your face. Weird indignities. He kisses your forehead, your lips, each of your closed useless eyes. You wonder what each says. _Inadequate_. _Needy_. _Useless times two_.

_I know I can’t do what you can, Sollux, but there’s still plenty I can learn. There’s time. For both of us. For all of us, thanks to you._

Where did this Karkat come from? Huge and gentle and he hasn’t insulted you in months, not really, not since After started and you lost that not-unpleasant disassociation of mostly dead. Everything is loud now, even without the Voices. Everything is too fast and not enough and too much. You reach up again and wrap your hand around the strap of his top and shiver. His hands tighten, you nod, and he lifts you up, lets you hook your chin over his shoulder, your free arm over his arm, lets you keep your stranglehold on his shirt as if it isn’t embarrassing.

You wrap your legs around him and your mess marks his jeans and shirt, yellow you can see only by the tacky-slick texture of it, soon to dry and crust. It’s not so elegant as his marks, it’s mostly just mess. It’s nice that he lets you, but you know he doesn’t need your marks the way you need his.

“Tomorrow night,” he says, soft, rumbly, his hands under your bottom, his own needs unmet, “Do you want to visit your bees tomorrow?”

“What about Jade?”

“She can wait. Or visit your bees too. What do you want?”

You let yourself just breath for a moment, make yourself absorb the motion of each of your five digits unclenching, live in the motion. You run your freed hand down his abdomen, feel the shift and clench that combines his support of your weight and his desire as well. You can hear the catch of his breath when you scratch your way down and the evidence is gratifying even as it makes you wince. You’re a shitty matesprit that you let him take care of you and don’t manage to return the favor. But you think he likes caring for you, just like you like the care. You’ll have to sort it out, later. He’s not pushing you, but you know the answer he wants. You think about it. Outside. Yeah. Okay. You’ll try it. Tonight. Before you lose your courage.

“I’m sticky. Wash my back and then take me to visit the bees?”

“ _Your_ bees.”

“Not sure about that, I’m not very good at taking care of them.”

“You’re welcome to try to convince them that they’re not your bees, but they seem insistent. Didn’t I mention? Easy to care for, once I convinced them that I wasn’t trying to steal them from you and to call off the strafing runs.”

He shifts you onto one arm and you hear a double thump as he taps his own shoulder, not far from the released shirt strap, solving the mystery of the double bump he has there, the lump that appeared, large and hot under your fingers, sometime After and has slowly been shrinking and cooling. Yeah, that would be like your bees.

“Fine. My bees. Ass.”

He laughs, this lovely deep sound that you have never managed and you use his distraction to get your free hand down the front of his pants. His yelps and the jerk of his supporting arm under you surprises you enough that your psionics flood out to support you both. Your powers feel clearer now, clearer than they’ve been in a while. You give the both of you a little lift and he tenses when his feet clear the floor but relaxes again when you hold the both of you steady.

“Wash my back and I’ll wash yours?” you renegotiate and he agrees. You float the both of you to the hygiene block and you don’t bump anything, psionics sharpened by the heady feeling of his trust. He relaxes into your invisible grip as if he is as certain of it as he is of the existence of walls and floors and ceilings.

His certainty seems novel, because your own certainty seems so long gone. You understand object permanence, you do, but how do you really know that this universe isn’t messing with you just because you can’t catch it? How do you know that what you think your psi is doing is more than just in your head?

*

You visit your bees, freshly bathed and having triumphed in making Karkat join you, both by request, and then by necessity. You are even double-rinsed. Things you never saw and will just have to imagine: KK dressed in only his lovely color, KK’s glorious post-molt musculature in a pool of red-tinged water, KK’s smile, entirely free of impending doom of any kind. Regrets, all.

You walk to the Outside with a hand on his arm, side by side, and the hallways are familiar, even as you get further and further from KK’s room, the room you could claim but rarely visit, the central meeting and food areas that have been almost empty since everyone left.

It is only now that you can really admit to yourself that your horizons have shrunk to mostly Karkat’s room, that you mostly work on your projects waiting for him, that you can’t remember the last time you spoke with someone else other than by chatlog.

Karkat slows to push open the last door, but not enough to let you hesitate, not even when you feel a breeze and smell air that is definitely not Meteor. He walks through sideways, still leading you, and since he is leading you, you follow, psionics lit again, flooding out sharper than in the narrow corridors, ears eagerly already listening for bees.

The night air is warmer and cooler than the inside, warm when the air stills, cool when it moves. You can smell plants, growing and blooming, prime bee fodder, and the air tastes like salt. Karkat walks, and so you follow, and he describes the things psionics can’t, the landscape beyond your reach.

He sits on a bench within auditory range of the hive egress and you sit and listen to your bees go about their business without you. There’s a distant sound of waves, less intimidating than it should be, and you think, _there’s so much room_. There’s an animal call, and then an answering call, and Karkat doesn’t laugh when you jump at both.

“It’s okay,” he promises. “In the restart Jade stocked the island with all the birds she thought are underappreciated or rare or something. No predators on land except us, not even particularly vicious insects, besides your bees, though we’ll probably get mosquitoes sooner or later.”

You sit for a while, listening to a revived chorus of distant birds as the air warms, the softer human sun rises, and then you do more than sit, first leaning and then moving into Karkat’s lap, and if your bees fly over to inspect you both while you make out, they don’t do much to interfere. You can’t see their flashes anymore, but if you concentrate, or they’re close enough, you can feel the tiny electrical impulses of their flashes. Little voyeurs are full of commentary.

After you get an accidental mouthful of bee you shoo them away from you both, gently flicking them out of his hair, and yours. The spat-out bee in your palm shakes itself and you try to wipe it off with the corner of your shirt. It squirms out of your grasp and launches, flashing insults. You laugh, and it feels like a weight you didn’t notice has suddenly lightened.

“I forgot what it was like when it was hard to find privacy,” you admit.

Karkat makes an agreeing, sort of prompting noise but doesn’t try to say anything. What can he say? _Yeah, well you were kind of busy pretending not to flip about being blind and not dead_? _I’m happy to be here to put the training ‘rails on our make out pails_? _Gee, I’m really glad that you’ve finally noticed how reclusive you’ve become_?

You tremble at your own temerity, and when you breathe, you feel inexplicably congested. You’re disgusted with yourself, you’ve hurled freaking moons and you’re panicky about a frenemy visiting.

“Today,” you start, and you mean it like a promise, “Jade should visit today.”

“Yeah?” and the smug jerk is amused and you know what he’s going to say before he does, know with that one word and his tone and the fact that sitting on his lap you can feel he’s fishing your handheld out of his own pocket.

“I _dare_ you to invite her.”

“ _Fine_.” And you do, slapping the innocent handheld back into his grip before Jade’s answering chime of agreement follows, seconds later.

“I’m proud of you,” he promises, serious.

“It shouldn’t be a big deal.”

“Still proud.” And, because this is uncomfortable for you both, he licks your ear with a loud slurp and lots of tongue.

 _Gross_ , concur your bees.

You roll your useless eyes at him and sit on him until his butt goes numb and make him try to identify all these loud flappy avians that are probably just biding their time to poo on you both. He’s horrible at it, so there’s that, and you text Jade back and forth until she arrives, arguing over if the one that sounds like it’s being strangled is really a frizzled who-what-now and you forget the sense of _impending_ for the sense of _amused_ until amused mostly wins and the thought of more voices, more people, more of this world, is cautiously excited expectation instead of empty-and-threatening abyss.

Jade arrives in a flurry of space-sparks, highly noticeable to your psionics, less so to KK, considering the resulting swears. She plunks something heavy and swishy and fragrant on the ground by your bench with a quick hello to you and between the garbled squawk from Karkat and the excited bees investigating the new plant you congratulate yourself on your fine and forward thinking.

It’s not that you forgot that KK used to have/maybe still has this huge crush on her, but he’s spent so much time taking care of you that you enjoy hearing him caught off-guard. She’s teasing him now about nighttime jungle chicken-choking, and it’s not like _you_ haven’t heard every human euphemism for genitals and sex due to Dave so it’s not like _he_ shouldn’t have seen it coming.

You laugh when he sputters and he sits back down on the bench and Jade sits down on your other side and bumps her shoulder into yours. You bump her back and Karkat wraps an arm around your shoulder and you lean into him but don’t move away from where your thigh aligns against hers. She pings your handheld and Karkat grumbles and fishes it back out of his pocket and you send each other ridiculous audio files and then weird hybrid tech questions until you almost don’t notice when he leaves and comes back with food.

He sits back down with you, the three of you now on the grass, bees still buzzing past with the occasional surveillance commentary and you don’t think, _where was he?!_ or _how long until he can take me back out of my head?_. Your head is an okay place to be right now. You don’t know how long it will last but it seems the sort of thing worth pursuing.

You know the meteor now, the comfortable box of it, the long stale hallways, the weird and tragic and terrible intersections of fate and corridor. Jade describes her island and you think maybe you’re up to visiting her there. Tomorrow, maybe, or tomorrow night. The sun, soft as it is, is still hot and the heat makes you drowsy while the sounds of people you care about, talking, safe, is a nice sort of thing to hear as you drift, head pillowed on your arms.

You feel the first bee land on your horn with a mutter about Karkat’s huge grasping appendages being safely occupied with fumbling with your handheld and then a few more land in your hair, also full of proclamations about the coast being clear of large hands, and one comment along the lines of all-clear-of-the-huge-face-gash which might come from the one you almost inhaled, who really ought to know better, but your bees are like you, kind of slow learners.

Karkat lays down next to you at some point, the warm day and nocturnal schedule defeating his indigenous insomnia at last. Jade sits with you both and works on her laptop and, when your muzzy mind equates the smell of dirt on her skirt and the bump of her knee under it with long ago pre-Game Aradia and you curl closer, she puts her hand on your back and you sigh. You tilt your head into her knee and give an appreciative hum when she scratches your back, you fall asleep feeling safe, that, however safe the island is because she chose what lives here, you’re really safe because she’s keeping watch.

Tomorrow, or tonight, there will be questions. _What do you want to do? What can you do? What dare you do? What’s best for Karkat? What would he do if he didn’t need to manage you?_ For the moment, you set them all aside.

It’s you so you should have expected starting over would take more than once.


End file.
